Model View Culture

https://modelviewculture.com/ Model View Culture has some great articles if you'd like to start educating yourself on why this is a particularly challenging problem.

So Unicode has all these mysterious characters... but I would bet that it's still true that many people on the planet speaking common languages can't even type their name... This post is from 2015, and I'd love to know if unicode has added better support for non-English languages since then. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i… Based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengali_(Unicode_block), only 3 more Bengali characters have been added since 2015.

One problem with internationalisation attempts is that most of the committees that have control over these things are from the Americas or Europe and so speak a Romance language natively and almost certainly speak English well (if not natively). There is nowhere near enough input from languages and cultures that might not fit European norms. There's a great article about a similar problem in Unicode: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

On a congruent note, California flops on compulsory English[1], the expressive void of the interwebs yawns at over a thousand emoji code points[2], and people actually think it's a great idea to champion patented punctuation marks[3] in everyday grammar. Can this guy[4] even spell his name yet? [1] https://outline.com/Gea52v [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emoji [3] https://www.google.com/patents/USD608820 [4] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

> It sounds almost too good to be true, but in the tech industry, if you can write great code you will succeed. < Yes, but the narrative is that minorities who don't write better code as good as the members of majority because the former never had privilege to learn how to write good code. Also do check out the articles which convinced Github that Meritocracy is not a good thing[1]. And the site 'Is Tech a meritocracy dot com" [2]. [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-merit… [2] http://istechameritocracy.com/

He means Model View Culture: [1] https://modelviewculture.com/ I think.

I think this is a great idea. While I think the execution could be improved (maybe a person wants to see an different therapist, or one outside the office), but attempting to remove the stigma surrounding mental health, and giving low friction access is huge. There is also the acknowledgement of the fact that most people aren't perfect, and nearly everyone could benefit from some sort of counseling. If everyone at your company is in perfect mental health you're either incredibly lucky, or kidding yourself. I think Shanley Kane put it best[1]: "People are broken, and people work at companies." [1] https://modelviewculture.com/news/the-eternal-and-toxic-optimism-of-st…

Not knowing much about him, let's throw a bunch of things at the wall and see what sticks: - https://model-view-culture.myshopify.com/products/your-startup-is-brok… - https://modelviewculture.com/ - Something by Don Reinertsen, maybe The Principles of Product Development Flow, maybe something else. - Valve Employee Handbook http://www.valvesoftware.com/company/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf - http://thinkrelevance.com/how-we-work - Ries, The Lean Startup All of these sources hide lots of dysfunction, so as always take them with a grain of salt. Take Ricardo Semler's fun books. In one of his Harvard Business School lectures, he mentioned how his books are artificially optimistic, because publishers want to sell more books.

Quoting from an article by her on meritocracy[1]: > In the Ruby world, we insist that “Matz Is Nice And So We Are Nice,” ignoring the sexist statements he has made with regard to diversity outreach efforts. We write off Linus Torvalds’ dismissal of diversity as an “unimportant detail” and justify it based on the utility of his creations. But why is it that we can proudly refuse to use software created by corporations whose often aggressive business policies we disagree with, but continue to adopt software written by sexists, racists, homophobes, transphobes? I feel that's pretty close to directly calling Matz a sexist. Later she proposes a Code of Conduct for Ruby so that there's a robust process for punishing sexism[2]. As far as I understand, Matz' tweet would have counted as an offence. Also, while her Contributor Covenant seems like it strives to make GitHub interactions more civilised, Caroline has a public Twitter account on which she screenshots people who disagree with her for her followers to sneer at (current, harmless example: [3]). Inexplicably (to me), this behaviour is fine by the logic of the CC. I'd say it's the highway to emotional escalation. Nothing of this invalidates her viewpoints, but her approach of working for change is more "take no prisoners" than "low friction". [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-merit… [2] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/12004 [3]…

it's unethical. I love Android because it's open and am happy that Google kept it that way... to an extent. Some of the things they do are backhanded. For example, there's a strong campaign to condition users to only trust Google for apps. Downloading any third party APK from Chrome brings up a scary warning: https://v5j7s7h5.ssl.hwcdn.net/v2/mkstatic/chrome-warning.png/w:480/h:… If you do a mobile search for porn apps, half the screen is taken up by anti-porn apps available in Play Store. They campaign that Play is the only legitimate and safe source, but malicious apps find their way in Play too. Instead of lumping all third party sources as "Unknown" and potentially dangerous, there ought to be a way for third parties to earn "Known" status and verified as a trusted source. But I doubt we'll ever get that fair treatment. It's not just Google though, obviously. These tech giants have the opportunity and thus responsibility to make a positive difference here. Instead, by blocking one of our most basic human desires, they often chose to devolve and perpetuate the war on sex. I daydream that, one day, tech giants like Google, Amazon, or Yahoo, or VCs and banks will say, “Let’s open our doors to SexTech companies we can trust.” We try to operate everyday as if this is a possibility, because one day I hope it will be. If you have time to spare, I go into a lot of it here https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/sextech-startups-in-a-hostile-busi… There's…

> Think about the open source software movement (OSS). One crucial perspective that the OSS shares with D&I is that both view discrimination as an impediment to progress. OSS licenses include several non-discrimination clauses (economic, field of endeavor, other restrictions). The licenses go to great lengths to ensure the technology is available to everyone. While licenses may have clauses that deal with some kinds of discrimination, OSS communities are not inclusive and may actually be outright hostile to groups of people. The last Model View Culture had an article about this [1]. Suffice it to say that there is no common community behavior that appears in all OSS groups and what is exceptable in one group vs. another varies quite a bit. > Or is it the open air bazaar, with all kinds of people talking (softly or loudly) in a place known for public discourse. A place where anyone can walk by and join in and become part of what's going on? Well this come back to the very common myth of meritocracy in tech, that tech only looks at merit and thus avoids discrimination, personal and institutional. However, meritocracy in tech often simply functions as a way for people to avoid talking about bias or pretending like bias doesn't exist. Moreover, what it means to look for merit is often defined as those statuses and symbols that are comfortable to the dominant group of people in tech, white men of middle or higher class backgrounds. > So this isn't really about embracing D&I.…

There are lots of Chinese people whose last names use rare characters or variants that are not mapped in Unicode. Taiwan, which retains traditional characters and hasn't forced people to standardize as much as mainland China and Japan, is particularly notorious for this. There's also the whole Han unification debacle, where similar but not always identical characters used in Chinese/Japanese/Korean have been mushed together. Support for some Indic scripts also remains quite patchy: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

Reading their first post about leaving https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-didn-t-want-to-lean-out, I'm not sure how seriously I should take this piece. 'They don't tell you ...'. Of course not, but they certainly hint at it. This is something that goes well beyond academia...

It's US's current cultural trend, which is now enforced on the rest of the world, and also on our descendants who may have different sensibilities. Maybe the Unicode Consortium should spend their energy on the real problem of third world languages underrepresented in the Unicode standard and spend less energy on the racial and sexual identity of pictograms. Related: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

Time used to implement all of these things is time not spent working on more 'useful' things. Like, from a comment up-thread, languages and scripts that people use in their daily lives: * https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

Indeed the non spender is in the majority. "Whales" - the term for those spending thousands - although few in numbers, are the ones accounting for most of the profit. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-whales-of-microtransactions-an…

This article is based on the assumption that those two statements from Rockford were the actual reason for his disinvitation - because that's "everything [the author's] been able to find". Which is not the case according to nodevember's statement[1]. Besides, the fact that the author is criticising people for calling for a disinvite of a white supremacist speaker from LamdaConf[2] doesn't quite increase my trust in his opinions. [1] http://nodevember.org/statement.html [2] https://modelviewculture.com/news/lambda-conf-fuckery-white-supremacy-…

There are some interesting reports by trans people in tech: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/gender-bias-in-hiring-interviewing… is one example. Ben Barres in biology also has some interesting stories (FTM).

I believe it's an issue with time resources. I would argue that new emoji characters are one of the less important uses of Unicode [1]. You are right that it is entirely up to the members of the Unicode consortium to manage their efforts themselves, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about that. I see a lot of these cases as bikeshedding [1]https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

Because it's easier to throw in random icons than to actually accomplish the goal of "every letter in every language in common use for the past 200 years", or even "past 20 years". Or, put another way: 'We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.' https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i…

This article has some examples - https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/i-can-text-you-a-pile-of-poo-but-i… There is also some discussion here - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219162 In this instance, someone is complaining that they cannot type their name on a computer.

The reason for this is that in many circumstances, male social value is determined disproportionately by the approval/disapproval of women. So when a woman turns a man down in this way, she not only rejects him for sex, but also reduces his social value. Any "fix" for this will drastically reduce women's social power. It's far from clear that women in general want this to happen. One complaint I've heard from a number of women about tech environments directly relates to this; a social butterfly who organizes parties and hackathons has lower status than the fat neckbeard who fixed all the performance problems. In fact, activists regularly moan about this: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/acknowledging-non-coding-contribut… https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/how-tech-devalues-social-media-wor…

Well, Ashe Dryden's pretty much debunked this whole line of reasoning better than I ever can. So I'll point you at that https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/dissent-unheard-of If you're still unconvinced, you might want to start examining your own sample bias.

This sounds like a good example of stereotypes turning into technical truth. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/c-is-manly-python-is-for-n00bs-how…

https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-dehumanizing-myth-of-the-merit… Remember that the term "meritocracy" was coined in a satirical essay about a dystopian society. It was not meant to have positive connotations.

Every time I see stuff like this, it reminds me of Betsy Haibel's article, "The Fantasy and Abuse of the Manipulable User: When mistreating users becomes competitive advantage."[1]. Once I started to see how much a lot of current tech tries to softly coerce us without our consent, it's been hard to unsee and hard to be okay with it. [1] https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/the-fantasy-and-abuse-of-the-manip…

This is someone anyone can do, or at least give it a shot. Have a look at this article on how to investigate identity online. It gives some thought to risk assessment and ethical behavior in responding to situations like this. https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/investigation-online-gathering-inf…

here's some tips on expanding your applicant pool: https://modelviewculture.com/pieces/25-tips-for-diverse-hiring